Hello everyone, my name is Linda Hirsch from the LMU Munich and I am presenting on behalf
of my co-authors Christina Schneegass, Robin Welsch, and Andreas Butz in our paper To See
or Not to See: Exploring Inattentional Blindness for the Design of Unobtrusive Interfaces in
Shared Public Places.
One of the challenges in designing for public places is that they are shared by a multitude
of potential users, direct and indirect.
Thus, prior work already stated that the content should only be presented to direct, interested
users but stay invisible for others to prevent interruption.
It led us to the question of how we can design interfaces to be visible for direct user groups
but remain easy to ignore by others or when not needed?
Based on this, we looked into the concept of inattentional blindness, the phenomenon
of being perceptually blind to something that is in focus but irrelevant to the task at
hand.
We wanted to explore its potential to support the aforementioned problem if considered during
the design process and in the spatial setup.
We developed a hypothesis that Indirect users involved in a specific task are less likely
to notice public interfaces not relevant to their task.
They will notice interfaces less frequently than direct users to whose task the interfaces
are relevant.
However, to approach this, we first needed to identify design strategies that exploit
Inattentional blindness from an interactive design perspective.
We decided to conduct a structured literature study in the ACM Guide to Computing Literature
using a keyword search inattentional blindness.
The extracted data sample included 231 publications of which we reviewed 135 after the cleaning
process.
We also looked into inattentional deafness at the beginning.
However, the search resulted in 4 publications only of which two wear written in another
language than English.
Hence, we decided to exclude this concept from our further analysis.
In turn, we scored all 135 papers according to 6 guiding questions: How was IB defined
in the work?, (B) What was the application context?,
(C) Was it evaluated?
And If yes - How was it measured?, (D) What were the reasons for inattentional blindness?,
(E) Does this work propose strategies to overcome its effects?, and (F) Does this work propose
a system, tool, or concept to exploit inattentional blindness?
We scored each category from 0 to 5 depending on how strongly the respective point was presented
in the prior work.
Due to time limits, we will not go into more details of the literature study results but
are happy to refer to our paper at this point.
The identified strategies to exploit IB and overcome IB influenced our interface design
for the follow-up field study when building our interfaces.
It means that we were looking into a range of more subtle and more prominent interfaces,
such as the screen displaying moving content and positioned at eye height versus the QR
code made from concrete and placed on a stair.
To test them, we conducted a field study at a historical place of daily use that is visited
for multiple reasons, such as exploring the historic architecture and history, having
a break, for events, or because people just live there.
Considering these observed user profiles, we created 4 study profiles, two for our control
group to notice our interfaces and two for our test groups to ignore our interfaces and
exploit IB. 40 participants took part in our study, 10 for each profile.
Participants were asked to look around the place and take pictures of everything related
to their task.
Once they were done, we asked them to complete a questionnaire and to also rate our interfaces,
independently if they had noticed them before or not.
Our interface selection included three items that were already built into the place and
two added by us.
The screen, the flagstone, and the sign were the already embedded interfaces, and the QR
code and the light concrete box were added by us.
The light concrete box displayed the word info and the scanned QR code guided participants
to the Place s museum s website with further information about the location.
Our results confirmed our hypothesis.
The direct user group noticed the objects in 73% of cases whereas the indirect (or test)
group only noticed them in 10%.
The table on the right shows more details revealing that participants with profile A,
the tourist, reported overall 90% of times on the objects and, in comparison, only 4%
of profile D, the event manager.
Profile B and C counterbalanced our results which still led to the confirmation of our
hypothesis.
On the interface level, we saw the biggest and significant rating differences for the
screen and the QR code to the questions how recognizable, easy-to ignore, and perceivable
the objects were.
We split the perceivable question into how perceivable the object was as an interface
within the environment.
In participant's qualitative feedback, they also stated that they, partly, didn't recognize
the screen as or as a possibility to receive further information and that it would also
not be suitable for the location, as it was too technological.
Regarding the QR code, participants noted that they are familiar with it as an information
carrier and thus, it was easily identified as an interface.
Unfortunately, we cannot go into more detail but summarising the main findings of our paper,
we can say that IB varies for direct and indirect users, and can, thus, be exploited for public
interface design.
Further, comparing the scores and the qualitative feedback, the op-down perception seems to
have a stronger influence in the outdoor context on the perception than bottom-up.
Perceptual psychology concepts support bridging the gap between direct and indirect user needs.
So, concluding everything, Inattentional blindness can be exploited to design explicit, yet unobtrusive
interfaces in shared, public environments.
Yet, there is the need to develop further guidelines, tools, and methodologies to make
it measurable and to turn it into clear and usable design guidelines.
Thank you very much, and I am looking forward to your questions.